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Home : 2009 : Feb : 26

    Teacher
    By AlaskaJon
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    I've been looking at the Smart boards over the weekend. I even had a chance to demo a Smart board and talk to a sales rep. I wanted to know about the Smart clickers and how they compare with the Promethean's ActivExpressions. The sales rep almost yelled at me about how students should not be allowed to text responses into a text device. I was a bit blown away. I asked her to clarify. She said that the technology would just be abused by teachers and that there was no real value in having the kids send their answers to the board. hummm. I was not sure if she had ever herd about formative assessment or not, but I tried to keep an open mind.
    During my evaluation process I came to several conclusions.
    1. The dirtiest part of the classroom are the students hands. No matter how often we remind them, they pick their noses and dig in theirs, and put their fingers god knows where... I don't even want to think about what happens in the bathrooms. We encourage them to keep clean, but with 30 kids, it's hard. I don't want to be rubbing my fingers all over the surface of a board the kids have been rubbing on. Call me a heartless or crass, but I don't thing is sanitary. At least with a Promethean pen, I can have one, and I can let the students use the other.
    2. One of the big selling features of the Smart board, I was told, was that the kids could through an object at the board in order to trigger a page turn. "The kids really love it", the sales rep told me...... I own a 50" plasma TV. If my two boys came home from school and tossed an object at the TV I would go nuts. I just don't think it's a good idea to teach kids to through objects at expensive technology. By the way, How much do projectors and bulbs cost? Whacking one with a ball has got to be a bad idea.
    3. One of the most important things I have to teach my students is penmanship. Touch is a very natural interactivity. Penmanship requires the development of fine motor skills and eye had coordination. When I was writing on the Smart board with my finger, I could not see where my mark was being made. I could only see the effects of my writing after I had written on the board. I noticed when I held the Promethean pen, the accuracy was more pronounced and I could write in cursive much more clearly. I'm not sure why Smart even has pens? I thought pens were "bad" and touch was "good"?

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